Mountain views

Berndt Sellheim has an author's note of distinct and particular proportions. Aged 39, he has a doctorate in phenomenology. He writes poetry. He drinks martinis. He's married to Tara Moss, best-selling author and model. And his first novel, an ambitious and layered story called Beyond the Frame's Edge, has just come into the world.

A childhood spent in Western Australia until age 10, led to eight years in a Sydney private boys' school, ''which I hated awfully''. A degree in nuclear medicine led to a year working as a hospital technologist ''to get some money together and skip town''. The journey that resulted - through Canada, the US, Europe, and back down to the Caribbean, ''where I found myself lying on beaches reading Descartes'' - led to an epiphany about writing, via the unexpected conduit of climbing rocks.

"My starting point is always language" ... Berndt Sellheim.

''In a sense, my entry into climbing was my entry into literature,'' he says. ''I was skiing in Canada, on the west coast, and when the snow started to melt, one of the guys I'd met said, 'I'll take you climbing'. It was the first time I really fell in love with nature - I felt this very powerful engagement with the natural world.''

Not only did this friend introduce Sellheim to mountains, he gave him things to read: ''I fell in love with writing as well.'' By the time he crossed the Canadian prairies reading Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, ''I put it down and said, 'that is what I want to do. I want to write.' I was about 23, and it was wonderfully liberating. I'd always had fun … but for the first time I thought, 'this is something I could devote my life to, and it would be absolutely worth doing.''' Returning to Australia, he completed a degree in philosophy and writing, and the doctorate - a year of it in Paris - on the work of two philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

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Beyond the Frame's Edge by Berndt Sellheim.

While these things fed inevitably, if tangentially, into the fabric and creation of his tale of family and coincidence, money and grief, what marks it most clearly as his, is its arc from the dark shale of north America to the banded sandstone of Sydney's Blue Mountains. The practice of climbing provides the novel with both geography and momentum.

Returning to Australia, spat out by the brutalities of the global financial crisis, the book's protagonist, Adyn Cole, makes his way to a house in the Blue Mountains, willed to him by a recently deceased uncle. As one arm of Sellheim's tale lays bare the rest of the Cole family's displeasure with this and various other bequests, the other follows the passions - or obsessions - of the two caretakers Adyn finds living in the house: the gorgeously French Camille, a lithe climber whose path has literally intersected with his on another mountain years before, and her boyfriend, Dylan, a manic mountaineer who ''drives too fast to hit anything''.

''Climbing is an incredibly meditative sport,'' Sellheim says. ''You push everything out of your mind and focus on the very technical elements of what you're doing. At the same time, what you're doing is quite intuitive - it's a kind of a dance. This relationship emerges between yourself and nature, and this plays in and out with the possibility of death.'' It's a counterpoint between attention and intuition that might also describe the practice of writing.

''In the novel, beyond using climbing to explore our relationship with nature, I wanted to touch on some of the philosophies I'd written about in my doctorate. Merleau-Ponty writes about embodiment, how we're linked in a very deep way to our world. Climbing seemed a good way to get inside his thinking about this, if you like.''

If phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty's theories of embodiment sound large or daunting, the pace and grace of his story reflects Sellheim's success as a conversationalist. He balances a warm affability against that sharp, wide intellect (and a poet; his work has appeared in journals including Meanjin and Overland). Because the thing he loves, apart from rocks, is language, and it's in the considered clarity of his metaphors and descriptions that this novel lifts and shines: ''the sudden rush of air like earth turned chocolate, rain-damp gone sweet with smoke''. The opening scene is gloriously arresting: a woman skis over the edge of a cornice and a man leaps out in her wake. At the other extreme comes a catastrophic climb that is ''a fall but not a fall. The sensation not so much a movement down as a rushing of air amidst this pulling, the yawning spin of earth, one true piece of ground to which all things are drawn … and above, the sky. The sky. Thinning now but vast.'' These tableaux, these moments, give pause in the bustle of the narrative beyond, where hostile and hungry relatives plan their contesting courtcase, and the impossibly inevitable intersection of Adyn and Camille comes on.

What draws these disparate parts together is Sellheim's fascination with what he calls ''the tangible transcendental'' - those things that are, literally, beyond the frame's edge. They're the shadows, the negative spaces, of things not quite there, not quite seen, not quite apprehended. And they underpin the relationships between several of Sellheim's characters in different ways.

''I'm fascinated by what is beyond our capacity to know,'' he says. ''It's a wonderful question. It probably led me into writing poetry, and into writing the novel. You can evoke something in a way that means a reader gets it, and feels they've had something transmitted to them - but they can't necessarily find a name for it. They can't say it's this.''

It's a point of deliberate haziness in an articulate dissertation. ''My starting point is always language,'' Sellheim says. ''Some writers begin with a great story; I have an idea, and I wonder about the relationship between language and that idea. My love of writing is very much the love of constructing sentences, feeling the textures of language and its music, and falling in love with it … that joy for me is a large part of the impulse to write.''

There was an attraction, too, in trying something longer than either poetry or his academic work. ''I wanted to be able to hang the various elements of our world on top of a single tableau,'' he says of the shift. ''Fiction is the best form to do that … you become a sort of anthropologist.

You can stand back, through the distance of the characters you're creating, and treat the world as something almost foreign.'' In Beyond the Frame's Edge, the world itself becomes a character. Creating an unsettling just-future - Sellheim describes it as ''our world, but on steroids'' - his global financial crisis is a little more apocalyptic; his climate a little more changed. The growing realisation that this weather is a little too extreme - and more dangerous - complements the character of Adyn's cousin, Marcus, the menacing prosecutor of the Cole family's money-grubbing disintegration, and the awful catalyst of the book's finale.

''Marcus was fun to write,'' Sellheim says. ''He is nasty, yet he possesses a strong sense of justice - it's just that what qualifies as injustice for him is warped. He's not, to my mind, the book's most ethically compromised character, but I wanted him to be someone you looked at a little uncomfortably, thinking, 'Well, he's awful, but … doesn't he have a right to be mad? How would I feel?' I was able to fall into his stride and kind of follow him in this very visceral way.''

It makes for an interesting domestic picture of the Sellheim-Moss household: Sellheim working up the storms - climatic and otherwise - of his manuscript, while his wife of three years worked up the supernaturally alternate New York of The Skeleton Key, and the dark and desperate world of Assassin, both published in 2012. In the middle of them both, there's the bright busyness of their daughter, Sapphira, creating all the worlds you can create when you are two years old.

There are things to be said for writers marrying writers, Sellheim says. Each understands the other's obsessions and preoccupations when a manuscript reaches a particular stage, ''and it helps that we work at completely different times of the day, at opposite ends of a big-enough house. It helps too that we come from very different places - Tara's very interested in non-fiction at the moment, and her advocacy work has taken off. Those things are entirely different from my own preoccupations and passions in the world of ideas.''

It's been a productive time for them both, since moving out of the city in 2009. There aren't as many everyday distractions, Sellheim says simply. ''Perhaps it makes more work possible.''

What comes next, he hopes - apart from the construction of any block-built edifices Sapphira might desire - is the ordering and organisation of his first book of poetry, and a second novel. Which, whatever story it tells, will be climb-free. ''Climbing and literature came together in the prolonged epiphany of travelling, so these things probably had to come out in my first book,'' Sellheim says. ''But I don't climb any more - I ended up with terrible tendonitis. It came to the question: do I want to have use of my hands when I'm 50? Well … now we live in the mountains, and I love them, mountains in general. There's this wonderful stillness, and an incredible immensity. The sublime moment: you can experience that in the mountains. It's the feeling of being awed by your environment and sort of joined to it at the same time.''

Beyond the Frame's Edge by Berndt Sellheim is published by 4th Estate. $29.99.